Oh to be a gorgeous Millennial. Acres of perfect skin. Soft hair. Delicate gestures. A voice like a cooing Siamese cat.

Of course, anyone born in the last twenty years has also lived without criticism (medals for everyone! You’re unique!) or rejection (everybody picked for the team!) thereby making any sort of conflict a total mind-fuck.

An accountant from Aliso Viejo, Kevin Woolwine, who is thirty nine years old and who enjoys the company of his Italian greyhound when not surfing, experienced a mind-fucked kid during the NSSA’s National Interscholastic Championships at Salt Creek in June.

A little scene setting.

The surf is two foot. The NSSA contest eats up the point. There’s a black ball at the north end. The weekend horde is squeezed into the middle.

“I got two young kids. I only surf on weekends so I need to get out even if it’s complete dog shit,” says Woolwine. “I need that two hours of sanity away from screaming kids. I don’t care what it looks like.”

He got the screaming kid anyway.

I could see this kid on the inside but it was a garbage little wave, a crap closeout, and I wanted to go home. He absolutely lost it. He gets in my face and screams, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Get the fuck out of here?’

“After about an hour-and-a-half of catching nothing I had to get out of there. So I take off on this fucking two-foot closeout. I could see this kid on the inside but it was a garbage little wave, a crap closeout, and I wanted to go home. He absolutely lost it. He gets in my face and screams, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Get the fuck out of here?’

“I was leaving but I wasn’t going to let this kid send me in. So he steps in front of me and at this point we’re pushing forehead to forehead. Just foreheads. And I’m looking at this kid and I say, ‘There’s no way in hell I can fight you but, dude, you can hit me if you want. I can handle your punches (Kevin was a collegiate wrestler). He threw seven or eight wild-ass haymakers. All I had to do was hold my hands up with my elbows. He clipped me behind the ear once, but it was no consequence. While he’s punching me a wave picks up my board and cracks him in the head.

“I feel bad. I mean, he’s a kid. We’re in waist-deep water and he starts screaming, ‘You just broke my jaw! You can’t hit a minor! You’re going to jail! I’m going to sue you!’

He threw seven or eight wild-ass haymakers. All I had to do was hold my hands up with my elbows. He clipped me behind the ear once, but it was no consequence. While he’s punching me a wave picks up my board and cracks him in the head.

Let me provide a brief detour from the narrative here. Do we live in a brave new era of lame surf assaults? And do you remember the case of Montgomery vs Burdett in Virginia Beach, the current title holder for World’s Lamest Surf Assault?

“He’s playing the victim and then he throws his board, fins first, at my head. After he missed with that he tackled me and tried to hold me underwater. I got out of his grip (wrestler, y’see) and I wanted to let loose, but, he’s kid, so I let him go. Another wave came and after we came back up he started jabbing me with the nose of his board. It was unbelievable.

“And then we get to the beach. And his dad has fire in his eyes. The lifeguard steps in and says he saw the whole thing. That I didn’t touch the kid once. Another bystander came in and said I didn’t hit him. Meanwhile, the dad and the kid were trying to turn mob on me and I was thinking, what am I going to deal with in the parking lot? One of the crew from the sponsors who was at least 260 pounds and covered in tatts told me, ‘You better get the fuck out of here now. The thing is, I understand their position. If I was over there and someone told me that someone much older had hit my kid I’d have the same reaction. But it was all based on bullshit.

“All my friends are making fun of me, having a fight with a sixteen year old but, dude, the amount of restraint I practised.”

Woolwine appeals to anyone who was on the beach filming to come forth with the footage, if only to share the laughs.

“I’m telling you, it’s internet gold,” he says.

As a sweetener, BeachGrit will pay $500 for any vision.

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Stab and The Inertia plotting the future.

Invasion: Reporting live from Venice!

I am currently sitting at a reclaimed wood and steel counter right in the heart of Venice’s Abbott Kinney drinking a hot fruit punch and listening to a “digital archaeologist” who “unearths deep musical emotion from obscure sounds.”

Venice.

Hot fruit punch.

It really feels that blonde roasts have become so ubiquitous in fancy coffee world that nothing is bitter anymore. Only very very very sweet with notes of cherry, Sunny Delight and Gatorade. I mourn bitter’s loss. I love bitter which may explain my general tone. It is also why I will cheer for France this Sunday in the World Cup final.

Being in Venice means I am very near to Venice-adjacent and Venice-adjacent’s own The Inertia and sister publication Stab. I am also very near to Santa Monica’s World Surf League international headquarters.

Enemies lurk around every corner. Inside every farm to table cafe and wine bistro. I already thought I saw Stab’s Sam McIntosh out on the street but it turned out to be German tourist wearing some lug soled Maison Margiela sneakers instead. I’m more worried about stumbling over The Inertia’s Zach Weisberg since he is three-feet tall and easy to miss. It would be very embarrassing to accidentally step on him after everything I’ve put him through here. An unnecessarily personal insult.

Herr Paul Speaker doesn’t seem like the coffee type and I’m not planning on taking a Segway tour of Muscle Beach so don’t plan on seeing him. Soph and Backward Fin Beth are mysterious though I don’t think they day drink and I’m going to start that at the appropriate 10:30 am.

Enemies everywhere and I wonder, has Venice and Venice-adjacent ever seen such a concentration of surf media enthusiasts? For decade Orange County held the surf industrial complex in its iron grip and, in many ways, surfing writ large came to reflect Orange County’s values. Conservative, cloistered, without imagination. What will surfing become here? The Inertia is trying desperately to morph it into a version of sport sandal bouldering. Stab is attempting to… to… I’m uncertain, to be honest. That rudderless ship will eventually wash up somewhere though and it won’t be pretty. Likely lots of Corona and party pics.

The World Surf League wants it to be broadly digestible. Understandable, relatable, clean. There is probably much head scratching in the office as to why all surfers don’t want this.

Each of these futures scare me but I don’t know which scares me most. The World Surf League’s, probably, though I have no talent whatsoever in sport sandal bouldering. I would like to hear presentations from The Inertia, Stab and the World Surf League. I’d buy lunch and listen attentively. Too bad each is more spineless than the next.

10:30 am. Time to drink.

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A horns-and-shaka tube exit at Honolua Bay! | Photo: WSL

Carissa Moore: “What am I outside of surfing?”

About two months ago now, I drove to Ventura to interview Carissa Moore. I’d never met her. I showed up at the rental house where she was staying in between a trip to the Surf Ranch and a family road trip to Yosemite. She came to the door fresh out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, and gave me a big hug, like we’d been friends for ten years or more. Of course, we hadn’t.

We sat across the table from one another, my recorder — two of them, actually — between us, in a borrowed RV that was parked in the driveway. Occasionally a car cruised the quiet residential street. The tight space formed a kind of bubble that felt cut off from the world. It was perfect, in fact.

As a writer, you never really know what you’re going to get when you sit down to an interview. I knew I’d get something, of course. I’ve only once interviewed someone who really said almost nothing. Women athletes, they always have plenty to say. But would it be good? I wanted it to be good. Carissa proved candid, self-reflective, and funny. When I went back through the tape, there was so much laughing.

Here is a short excerpt from the interview transcript to taunt you! This is all part of my nefarious plan to convince you to read the full story. Is it working? Maybe it’s working.

Carissa: “I remember going home from [the 2017 U.S. Open at] Huntington and thinking, I have to make a decision here. I’m going to commit until the end of this year and give it everything I’ve got and let go a bit of the pressure and expectation. That was my lowest point. I felt like that was really a turning point for me.”

“I think, like, for the longest time, I just considered myself a surfer. It was really hard to look at myself and ask myself what am I outside of surfing? Like, how can I be happy if I’m not getting the results? What does success and happiness look like for me?”

“Do I want to do something completely different and go free surfing and make movies? Definitely. Definitely I want to do that. But am I making that decision because I’m losing right now? Or is it that I’m actually burned out and need a break? If I won, would I would be fine? Of course. I would be fine. I would definitely be fine.”

“I think both Steph and I are surfer’s surfers. We’d rather have there be lots of waves and just have it come down to performance. But the reality of it is, most heats don’t come down to that. So it’s like, I want to be able to do those special performances, but you’re going to have grindy heats most of the time, you know? So it’s just being able to handle the pressure when there isn’t as much opportunity.”

“I go to the ocean and I love surfing, because there’s an element of peace. There’s an element of, the rest of the world disappears, and it’s just you and the ocean. There’s something, there’s something about surfing that’s so spiritual.”

“I think taking the time to be reflective and reminding yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. That for me, what’s really helped me in the past couple of years, is that the results don’t define me. I’m more than a surfer.”

Now pour yourself a fresh beverage — your choice may depend on your time zone, or not! — and please enjoy the full story. Because you know you want to.

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From where you'd rather not be.

Biblical: This failed rock jump will collapse your nervous system!

See the ocean open up and attempt to swallow Brazilian big-wave surfer.

There are rock jumps and there are rock jumps, wouldn’t y’say? Some require a sort of heroism, a fifty-metre run across a bare rock shelf as sets bear down, while others aren’t much more than a skip-skip-jump.

Snapper Rocks is unsympathetic and liable to humiliate. A few of those joints in Chile will entangle you with gigantic rock formations and collapse your nervous system.

And then there’s something like this, starring the Brazilian surfer Daniel Rangel. Now Dan, who is thirty four years old, ain’t no kook. He’s been surfing competitively since he was nine, lived on Oahu’s North Shore for ten years, tries to self-immolate at big Teahupoo every summer and currently lives on Kauai.

So when you see Dan in a situation of utter despair, a rock jump where, for a moment the ocean opens up and tries to swallow him, you know it’s sorta treacherous. This rock jump is at a slab called, appropriately enough, Shock near the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niteroi, Rio.

“I was super embarrassed more than worried,” he says. “There were about 150 people watching and filming the rocks. So I was thinking to myself, what a kook move. Just trying to keep the calm face on and paddle away like nothing happened. But, yeah, when I realised I fucked up the timing I was pretty worried. Right after that, I borrowed my friend’s board ’cause mine was all fucked with no fins and caught this wave.”

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Surf Quiz: “What’s your signature move?”

I was a bad surfer for many years and then I died. I think that will be my epitaph. If a book was written it would be called Journal of a Pointless Life.

Still, I persist. And I persist with a manner of surfing that, although tweaked here and there, a few weeks spent doing throwaway airs, a month on backside on-the-face reverses that are more cutbacks into a long, slow slide, remains largely the same, year after year, wave after wave.

My signature is to hesitate on the take off, examine the nose of my board briefly, stay in the push-up position for a second or two, eventually take off, race to the shoulder, do a hands-in-the-air cut-down followed by a pump-pump-pump, a jerky sorta mid-face turn, race, race, race, to horizontal closeout and look to the beach for any sign of delight on faces of spectators.

What’s your signature? And what defines your signature? Are you tall and gangly (Chas) or a little pert one with round thin shoulders (me)?

Is your signature self-conscious and your volume too hot: standing upright, jerky arms, or is your signature a great self-control, as if you’re bored with the whole thing and you want to go to bed?